not quite so simple
One of the world’s most famous philosophy conundrums goes something like this:
You’re standing by a railway line when you see a train hurtling towards you, out of control: the breaks have clearly failed. Fortunately, the runaway train is approaching a junction with a side spur. If you flip a switch you can turn the train off the main route and onto this spur, saving five lives. That’s the good news. The not-quite-so-good news is that on this side-track another person is tied down. Still, the decision is easy, right? By altering the train’s direction only one life need be lost rather than five.
The problem continues:
This time you’re on a footbridge overlooking the railway track. You see the train hurtling towards you and, ahead, five people tied to the rails. Can these five be saved? Again, the moral philosopher has neatly arranged it so that they can. There’s a very fat man leaning over the footbridge. If you were to push him over the footbridge he would tumble over and squelch on to the track. He’s so obese that his bulk would bring the train – Trolley B – to a juddering halt. Sadly, the process would kill the fat man. But it would save the other five.
What should you do? Philosopher Nigel Warburton and journalist David Edmonds this month write an essay investigating such choices—not so much for their capacity for to puzzle, but for what you can learn about the hidden and hard wiring of the human mind by asking them. The fat man on the bridge problem lights up a different part of the brain to that thin man on the tracks. In the essay, the authors lift the lid on the new experimental philosophy, or “x-phi”, movement, which seeks to bring together arm chair theory, neuroscientists with MRIs and psychologists with clip boards and Jungian theory—all in the aid of trying to unpick the basic of human rationality. Not to put it too confusingly, it appears we don’t actually think the way we seem to think we think, one of the reasons why x-phi itself is so controversial among philosophers themselves.
In other news, as you’ll see to the right of this post, Prospect this month is launching its first podcast: you can find it on this very blog, just to the right in the middle of our menus. Nigel, who has become our Resident Philosopher, will every month examine a problem in the news. Its a small experiment, so do tell us if you like it.
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The article was very interesting. As for the podcast.. I like the idea of a philosophy podcast. Wasn’t a big fan of the first one though. Haven’t we heard enough about those bloody buses? Secondly, surely Nigel can come up with something more enlightening than Hume and Pascal? Couldn’t he comment on the very idea of demanding proof for God? On demands that God must be looked for in the world? Do the religious really ‘believe’ in God like they believe that there is a dog barking outside? People don’t have faith because they bumped into God in the park, do they? Empirical argument perhaps isn’t the best equipment for dealing with the divine? If God is infinite and perfect then how can we possibly understand what proof of God might be? Can we even understand God as a concept?
Couldn’t Nigel have tried to bring a different perspective to the whole bus debacle? Or have done something completely different – is the bus story really still news?
Surely the point of having a relatively eminent philosopher give a podcast is to share some kind of insight that’s generally lacking from the average conversation down the pub.
Another grumble (sorry, I do like the idea!):
This is a monthly podcast and yet it is only 3 minutes long? Can’t you make it a little bit longer?
Wait a minute! Is this just an audio version of the questions that A.C.Grayling used to do? (Has Prof Grayling departed then?) If so then it gets double negative points since it doesn’t even answer the question: What if God was on a bus?
Having spent a hundred years masquerading as a science, psychology now masquerades as philosophy!
Surely the greatest piece of contemporary philosophical riddle-solving is to be found in the current Prospect cover story. Confronted with the ethical problem of individualism as it has transformed the very fabric of Western society since the 1960s, the authors reveal:
“Thankfully, there is a consensus about how to respond. Put bluntly, and uncomfortably for many on the left, it turns out that the social conservatives were right all along.”
Next!
Regarding x-phi.
(1) “Causes” ( useful in science) are not “reasons” (useful in explaining human responses). X-phi, sadly, conflates causes and reasons.
(2) In real trolley-like crisis situations, responders do not think. They act, and their action is automatic and instantaneous, the result of what H-G Gadamer calls tacit knowledge, or embodied knowledge.
(3) Tacit or embodied knowledge develops as a result of social interaction: education and training (what Gadamer calls “Bildung”).
(4) Because tacit knowledge comes from social interaction, from a psychological point of view, it is the person’s internalized model of the environment. it is this internalized model of the social environment that is the true context in which the person acts.
Pointing a machine at an individual’s brain while not understanding these four points is just plain silly.
X-Phi seems little more than a trendy philosophy by survey. While I’m a pragmatist, and as such support an empirical approach, the undergraduate psychology approach is not going to solve or even illuminate any philosophical problem.
Take the stupid trolley thing. The problem with the x-phi approach, and trolley-ology in general, is that it conflates a thought-experiment scenario with real life. Surely if the situation were ‘actual’ then there is NO way one would push the fat man – because who are you to be so sure that that plan will succeed, and you will likely kill an extra person. That is why, I suspect, most people don’t want to push him off, because they are going along with the thought-experiment. However, others, and I’m one of them, think: ‘Well, on the face of it I must accept the parameters of the thought-experiment as absolute if it’s to have any point. IF I was granted omniscience at that point, then OF COURSE I would push the fat man – it wouldn’t be a hunch, I would definitely be saving five lives.
So the problem is that there is a frame confusion, and this is the same problem with the x-phi scenarios, leading to facile results. Tests based on such questions don’t uncover anything ‘deep’ about covert emotional biases, but simply prove that different people respond differently to stupid questions.
Western philosophy giving too much importance to thinking faculty and completely negeleted emotion,Most great thinker riduculed emotion as a sentimentality.
Man is social animal,all social relation depend on emotion.
Nietzsche rightly said that our deep emotion disgused in logic.
Every man is unque, his emotion are also unque , and his logic is different.Thinking always arised from emotion.We turn our emotion in to logic.
Einstein also rightly said imagination is more important than thinking.Imagination always arised from emotion. If western thinkers want balanced their thinking faculty them must give importance to emotion.
Let me see if I have this right. “We” have an “intuition” that, given “if P, then Q” and “P” that “Q” follows as a logical consequence. So we should conduct experiments on untutored subjects to see what percentage of them agree, and when they don’t, what they think instead? And this would help us understand the nature of logic… how exactly? Why don’t we discover philosophical truth simply by looking at Amazon sales rankings of books classified as philosophy? In that case, I learn by empirical inquiry, that “The Shack,” by William P. Young is the source of all truth.
If x-phi makes a contribution to philosophy, it will not be by making discoveries in philosophy, but by making philosophers aware of just how often they appeal to intuition casually and unreflectively, and how much less they should do so. It will not do so by furnishing further information of philosophical significance, because it has none to furnish. I can also think of more interesting areas of *psychological* research than seeing what areas of the brain light up when presented with a philosophical question. I doubt very much that our minds are shaped by evolution to ask philosophical questions, nor are most people’s minds trained by their environment to ask philosophical questions, so these kinds of experiments would shed about as much light on the nature of the mind as trying to see which parts of the brain light up when haiku in Japanese is pumped into the ears of an English-speaking taxi driver from Queens.
The degree of confusion that animates this entire enterprise is stupefying, but it should not be surprising that of all the many things one can find in recent philosophical discussion, our scientistic culture finds this of all things most newsworthy.
It is amazing to me that several of the commentators here are prepared to take such a dismissive stance WITHOUT EVER HAVING ACTUALLY READ ANY OF THE PAPERS. There are scads of this stuff available on the web; do your freakin’ homework, people.
The first of Joshua Knobe’s cases, as cited in the article, doesn’t increase one’s confidence about this X-Phi business. I’m referring to the company chairman and his project – first harming the environment, then helping it. We’re told that most people think that he intentionally harmed the environment in the first scenario, but didn’t intentionally help it in the second. A “weird” outcome, apparently.
But it’s not weird at all. There are two “goods” here: making a profit, and helping the environment. The first is a private, selfish, good; the second is a public good. In the first scenario they conflict, and we therefore condemn the chairman who puts his selfish good over the public good. In the second case the two goods coincide rather than conflict, so no decision needs to be made about which should take priority. The chairman in this case has no decision to make. It’s therefore entirely reasonable for people to think that the chairman intentionally harmed the environment in the first scenario, but didn’t intentionally help it in the second.
So whaddya know? – most people’s intuitive reaction is entirely sensible, while the psychologists are so tied up with their MRI scanning that they can’t think straight.
That’s why you need philosophical reasoning.
Oh, boy, this is fun. Another vein has appeared just when I thought I’d collapsed all of mine. I like this x-phi business. It feels right. I kinda knew this shit when I first got diabetes fifty years ago and then became a junkie a few years later how the truths of scientists are nothing compared to the truth of the moment for all but the most dead of us. Some of the writers hammered away at it and Freud of course helped, but it wasn’t until I started on the old dogs of philosophy did the battles really present themselves in all their glory. Now, it’s even a messier brew and a tastier one. Panksaap began to hip me, and Klein, Kernberg, Lacan, Zizek, and now I hear about Knobe and Papineau. To be governed by pain/pleasure, absence and desire, in its most pure form is a hard thing to “study.” I would have had to be hooked up to some recording instrument as I passed the liquor store today, or the pharmacy. You would have had to be with me while I secreted a dying persons bottle of morphine or wondered at my last beer. You’d have to be wired into the horseplayer who prays at a toteboard or scavenging for the last crumbs in the bag of Oreo cookies. Instead, I do have an alternative. Read my memoir, JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC. Freddy N was right in his own wonderful way. I’ll raise one for him tonight.
http://smashwords.com/books/view/715
Interview : http://blog.smashwords.com
I make no judgment as to whether this new movement is valid, useful philosophy or not. I merely observe it is a reaction to the deadening hand of conceptual and linguistic analysis which has been the dominant strain in philosophy for so long. It simplifies and strikes out in a new direction, at the same time making contact with certai strains in philosophy’s more distant past. In these respects, it might be called post-modern philosophy. And it echoes similar movements in music, where in reaction to 12-tone absolutism, there came along the sinpler and more melodic minimalism; and in architecture where in reaction to the ultimately sterile environment fostered by too-prolonged severe modernism, there came along the more relaxed post-modernism. All of which suggests that certain kinds of philosophy may be thought of as closer to art than to science. I think Nietzsche would have agreed. And perhaps the poster above who stresses emotion so much might agree, although I think he needs to consider the problem of a lack of a definition of emotion.
When presented as a call to action against sterile intuitionist Anglo-philosophy of the past century x-phi has exciting promise.
Unfortunately, as presented in this article, it’s terribly facile, failing to even approach the worldly engagement of Aristotle or Nietzsche who are cited so admiringly.
The flat utilitarian discussion of the trolley problem is particularly disappointing. The mischaracterization of compatiblism is revealing. Perhaps, I shouldn’t get so upset at a clearly amateur effort.
Moral philosophy would be a harmless game of logic if only it were not used by real politicians as cover for real abominations.
When we talk about circumstances under which ‘collateral damage’ in war might be acceptable, we muddy the waters, and undermine the moral case against murdering several million Iraqis in an unprovoked war aggression with no redeeming value.
When Alan Dershowitz wrote in 2003 about a bizarre, hypothetical scenario in which torture might be justified, he gave cover to the Bush Administration, which shortly thereafter began to use torture indiscriminately against innocent civilians, for political gain.
When asked about the ‘fat man’ trolley case, I imagine trying to explain a decision to push him to a jury- ‘yes, uh, you see, I calculated that this man weighed X kg, and that such a weight would stop a train of Y kg travelling at Z mph in A m, so that the train would stop B m before the people on the track.’ ‘the train was moving quite fast, making it difficult to see through the windscreen, especially at that angle. What made you certain that the train was out of control? If you saw no driver, how did you know it was not computer controlled?’ My reaction would be that killing someone is wrong, yes, but also that of terror that I would be making a bad decision, based on information that is not reliable.
The lever example is completely different, as I presumably would be a railway worker. I would thus know a runaway train when I saw one, and be absolutely certain that pulling the lever would do what I thought it would. There would be no fear about the reliability of the information.
Moreover, in the fat man case I am a bystander with no connection to the railway, whilst in the lever case I’d feel some responsibility to intervene because I am a railway worker. A vast amount of ethics derives from peoples’ roles, and a vast amount of ethical dilemmas occur when the demands of two or more roles conflict. Just concentrating on the action can’t provide a sufficiently nuanced account of ethics, I think.
I thought the article should have challenged the Appiah quote a bit: surely if people *always* found a dime in a telephone box then the effect would wear off? If the effect depends on unpredictability then it strikes me that it would take enormous resources to constantly devise and carry out unpredictable activities- rather more than setting up a Scouts or a cricket team or whatever ‘character-building’ organisation is in mind.
Unpleasant places do seem to encourage less ethical behaviour though: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12630201
Perhaps the corollary is also true, as in the article’s bakery example?
X-phi doesn’t necessarily discredit Aristotelian ethics- for good or ill, probably the most influential factor in human ethical decision-making is ‘what is the done thing?’ That kind of thinking is always influenced by a conception of the respectable person, which implies a model of character. Plus the article makes it sound like Aristotle rejected the idea of weakness of will!
To me X-phi is far more likely to discredit those theories of ethics that depend on the application of some rule. There was that experiment on trainee priests who had to study the parable of the Good Samaritan and deliver an important sermon on it. Experimenters delayed so that they were running late and put on their routes a man in clearly desperate need of help. Rather few priests actually acted as Good Samaritans. They knew the rule, believed it to be moral, but it didn’t make them act upon it. Exhibit B on this one is that I once asked my ethics tutor if studying ethics had made him more ethical. He just laughed…
About the podcast, 3 minutes is way too short- it felt like a bluffer’s guide, and wouldn’t have contained anything particularly interesting for those who’ve read a bit of philosophy. I know the speaker can do much better- his ‘Philosophy Bites’ podcast is excellent, I think. Make a podcast more like that next month, please!
Philosophers who talk about the problem of free will in a mechanistically-determined universe are stuck in a 19th century conception of physics, and have failed to assimilate the radical message of quantum mechanics.
Within the physics community, there are vigorous debates about how the future is created from the past, where new information comes from, and the significance of non-causal links (‘entanglement’) among distant events. Physicists differ in how they like to formulate the ‘newness’ in each moment, but we agree the idea of a mechanical, deterministic physics is long dead.
Ah, nobody spotted the five tied to the tracks before the train showed up? Right, pull my other leg.
People, if you’re going to present moral difficulties, make them believable.
It doesn’t take philosophical or scientific acuity to find holes in the x-phi argument about its relevance for understanding or thinking about morality. Or that it might contribute to resolving long-standing problems of free-will vs. determinism. If empirical behavioral research, which in many of the instances cited in Edmonds’ and Warburton’s article is nothing more or less than polling, finds a trend in the way people say they will act in specific hypothetical cases, all we get is an abstraction related to some kind of “decision theory” which masks all of the conscious and unconscious realities of situations in life that require quick decisions. The trolley/bus problem is getting a little malodorous from age.
MRI is a notoriously blunt instrument, even when used for diagnosis biomedical problems for which it was developed. As a “tool of philosophy” it hasn’t reached stage where it could be a useful part of the “tool kit”.
There’s a certain loss of reality in the discussion as presented by E & W. For instance, look at the following paragraph:
“There’s a lot at stake. Peter Singer, the controversial utilitarian thinker and animal rights advocate, believes that while there are evolutionary explanations for why most of us recoil from pushing the fat man, reason should lead us to overcome our squeamishness. For him, there is no overriding moral difference between the two trolley examples, or between intentionally killing civilians in war and their deaths as a byproduct of a military objective. Other philosophers strongly disagree. If x-phi research could settle this debate, it would be quite an achievement.”
(1) In any given case, evolutionary psychology has the big problem of often being entirely plausible while also being a “functional” just-so story not susceptible of either proof or disproof.
(2) Re. Singer. What force in the world will ever make people defer consistently to reason over strongly felt (”biologically programmed”) emotions, even when it is clear that reason supplies them with a better course of action?
(3) If Singer is correct in his arguments that the anti-rational choice of most people in the hypothetical trolley case and the notion of the acceptability of collateral damage in war is similar immoral behavior (two cases of the same kind of thing, with differences in scale and the kinds of self-justifications used by the deciders) and that they should be reversed by the claims of reason, how could this ever be “settled by x-phi”? I.e., how would it be an “achievement” unless people who make such decisions about things like when and where to drop bombs accepted it? Are such people really open to or interested in such (experimental) findings? Will they be influenced by a “prevailing consensus among philosophers”? Not likely.
On free-will vs. determinism (or “intentionality”) about a decade ago the pop-science Danish journalist T. Norretranders wrote a book translated into English as “The User Illusion – Cutting Consciousness down to Size”, which, among many other topics relevant to understanding consciousness, examined very interesting electrophysiological data (EEGs collected from the scalp and/or from depth electrodes penetrating various areas of the brain) that even the earliest subjective recognition of “making a decision” is preceded by a specific pattern of unconscious EEG activity, indicating that “you’ve decided before you can ever know you decided” (or, in other words, some aspect of unconscious mental activity has made the decision for you). The experiments and findings go back to the 1970s and stimulated a long debate between scientists and philosophers; each side made strong claims for its own position based on one and the same results (yes or no to “free will”). Go figure.
dear Josh Mitteldorf,
in your second comment you have somewwhat missed the point (in fact your first comment is pretty off mark as well, but in a differnt way, which we need not get into). the thesis of determinism does not need to be the mechanistic a causes b determinism of the newtoniam physic for the promblem of free will to rear its ugly head. it needs only to be the general thesis that the world is governend by physical laws of some kind. quantum mechanics seems to suggest a much more complicated causal picture, with probability, and randomeness, but none of this makes a jot of difference to the question of free will. Randomness no more saves the moral agent than total determinism. what would save the moral agent is what gallen strwson calls the agent “causa sui” the agent that casued itself, and nothing in quantum physics could point to this.
p.s. X-phi sounds rubbish, literally, “x-phi” its not the flipping nineties, whoever came up with that name sounds like when a dad is trying to impress his kids mates.
Peace
Intriguing article. A few points of note:
- Science and philosophy are never properly separate. Philosophy underlies science; and science in its more theoretical forms (such as theoretical physics) necessarily involves philosophical speculation about the nature of time, space, knowledge, etc.
- “Science seems to reveal a world in which every event is explained in terms of prior causes and prevailing conditions, with no apparent room for free will.” This simple Newtonian model of the universe was discredited with the advent of quantum mechanics long ago.
I am not looking forward to the day when we equate complete physical understanding of how the human brain works with the meaning of life in this universe. What a sad, myopic model of reality, and at the same time so very apropos in this highly materialistic phase of human cultural development.
This is an interesting quote from wittgenstein, which might or might not be relevant:
Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and to answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics and leads philosophers into complete darkness.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
I wonder whether experimental philosophy will finally solve this problem:
http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/Tissues.htm
My problem with x-phi is that x-phi is science, and scientists are better at doing science than philosophers. Unless philosophers become scientists.
I come from a History and Philosophy of Science background, with a particular emphasis on history of the mind sciences. When I first encountered xphi I didn’t see how this was such a big deal—experimentation is older than philosophy itself and has always contributed to it (yes, even to the postmodernists). But what worries me is this quote from the article: “But for the x-phi fan, empirical research is not a mere prop to philosophy, it is philosophy.”
It mirrors a rather insidious trend in common society that scientific and experimental evidence is being treated as absolute in all sorts of new areas, including fields as notoriously ambiguous as mind sciences, psychology & psychiatry, and now, I presume, philosophy. This is why psychotropic drugs are being substited for talk therapy—while the latter is a crucial part of any mental health case, it’s being substituted for drugs since they’re seen as more scientifically-bases (and also less expensive, at least in the U.S.). What the focus on science in psychology and philosophy ignores is that science is itself a subset of philosophy—I’m talking about the German wissenschaft model, where science is synonymous with system of ideas. Not only does treating science as an absolute philosophy hurt philosophy, but it also hurts scientific progress, as people who have a different set of absolute values (e.g. religious zealots) see science as a threat, and those agnostic about absolutes see every failing and ambiguity within scientific research as proof it cannot be trusted. More science is a good thing in philosophy, and I would argue the humanities in general, but not a substitute for what philosophers do best: think about the larger implications. Anyone’s who met a scientist knows that they can’t really do that well until they have tenure.
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